The Work of Patience (and a leaving host) (Thursday 7/2)

I awoke to a very quiet house this morning (there’s usually music playing or sounds of talking in the main room). I believe Paul and Morrine slept in as they stayed up late watching a World Cup soccer match (Paul had money on the game through a sports betting app and had to make sure he didn’t lose it all; what a wonderful role model!). I snoozed my alarm several times until it was finally time to get up. Paul came by to say good morning and let me know that he had boiled me water! I got myself out of bed and found a lot of water waiting for me that was actually hot this time around (I had grabbed cold water yesterday). 

I took my bucket bath, and while getting dressed, Paul left to go start work at the office. After getting ready, I went to eat breakfast with Morrine! We had rice, beans, and avocados with salt. Honestly, it’s a combo that I’m not getting sick of, especially the avocado. It was sad to not have Paul eat with us as he’s a good translator between his girlfriend and I, therefore, we ate in silence. 

With my meal completed, I grabbed my stuff, took the router and got up to the office around 9:30am. At the office, there was quite the project outside. Several people have been working on making a fence around the garden area of the office and working on marking out official parking spots. 

There were many deep holes dug in the ground for posts (Paul was digging one when I arrived) and you could see the deep red colored soil. Their system to make sure all of the posts were leveled was quite simple; with a piece of line nailed into the corner posts, you could easily line up each and every post. To ensure the posts did not rot in the ground, the bottoms were dipped in old engine oil! The whole project looked like a ton of fun to be a part of and I know that at one point Michael was helping out (I never was asked to help, but I’m sure if I would’ve just asked they would’ve let me).

With my observation of the project complete, I got to the office and nobody was there! Michael had not shown up yet and everyone else was teaching. I realize if I got up there sooner I would meet everyone there, but I don’t choose when we have breakfast! I wanted to teach Kolibri today as I knew all of the Chromebooks were working and I could test to see if my server would work with so many computers connected to it (20+ computers would pose quite the problem).

I worked solo on math club reviewing when Henry and Eli came in. We all worked together for a bit before Henry and I needed to go teach. However, before I left Mr. Chesco brought me a new side project he wanted me to work on; his home laptop. The laptop was ancient, filthy, horribly beat up, and crazy slow. He wants to get it working again to download movies and let his children use it to learn and play on it. Thankfully it turns on (as long as it’s plugged in as it has no battery) which means I have something to work with. Mr. Chesco wanted me to get some progress on the laptop and “give him hope” so he let me show up late to the classroom office (he’d teach and supervise for the time being).

The first thing I needed to do was get the internet to work and a whole slew of other problems. Being such an old laptop, it had an old operating system (Windows 7), and thought the date was April 13th, 2007 (I was hardly two months old!). None of the internet browsers would work and there were clearly viruses on the laptop. It was also clear that the laptop’s password was “landstain” as it was carved into several places on the laptop. Through an ethernet cable I was able to get the internet to work and figured that was good enough progress for now.

Hands full of Kolibri stuff, I walked to the classroom with Michael! He wanted to watch the class as he has nothing better to do (his mechanic work is very much on and off). I set up all of the Kolibri components and began teaching the Form 1 students how to get Kolibri onto their computers and work with it. To make a long story short, it was rough. Form 1 students are inherently rowdy to begin with and aren’t very good at speaking English. Communicating simple computer commands doesn't make any sense when you don’t understand a single word I’m saying. Perhaps it was out of a fearful respect, but when I was working with a student one on one, I would give very slow and explicit instructions and they wouldn’t do anything! So instead of telling, I had to do a lot of deliberate showing. This is completely fine, but can be very tedious when you have to carefully show each and every student how something works. 

The one thing that was nice about six laptops was that you only had to demonstrate something six times. With 20 laptops, this called for a lot of repeating myself! For example, the idea of using the “shift” key or moving the cursor to the right spot is very difficult for these students. Thankfully Michael was there to help me and we were able to work together as a team! We were able to assist many of the kids in a timely manner, but still ran out of time for the class. Mr. Chesco let us teach for another 20 minutes so the kids could explore the program and get some more time behind the computer. All in all, I’m very thankful for this teaching experience as it helped me become more compassionate and caring when I’m helping others. Instead of getting upset, I put a smile on my face and slowly walked through the process.

Class was dismissed and while putting away Kolibri I was left with two sentiments. One that the students and teachers need to learn how to use a computer long before we do Kolibri. If the students and teachers understand a computer, Kolibri will be easy to pick up and be more beneficial in the long run (no long awkward learning phase with the computer and Kolibri at the same time)! And two, that the hardware ran perfectly for Kolibri (the user experience seemed to be unaffected by the large number of computers connected to the server). 

I got back to the office, documented my findings and got back to work on Math Club while also working on Mr. Chesco’s computer. The progress on Math Club was slow as we’re drawing many diagrams on the computer by hand (tedious work). Eventually Eli, Henry, Miraclin, and Michael left for lunch and I stayed back to work on the laptop. I got a browser to work, but wow is the computer slow. I know that’s is very old, but it shouldn’t be running this bad. We’re talking 30 minutes of waiting for a YouTube page to load! The only fix to this issue is to wipe the entire computer clean (both digitally and physically. The laptop smelt like poop…). Michael came back sooner than everyone else as there was no lunch at his place and would come to mine instead. In the meantime, I showed him how to pirate movies and shows online so he could download the stuff he wanted to watch (copyright laws and what not are pretty relaxed out here). 

Paul came in a little later to tell us it was time to eat and I had to make sure it was actually time to eat. I had just gotten into the groove of figuring out the next steps for Mr. Chesco’s computer and didn’t want to go down to the house to wait for two hours before eating. He promised it was ready so us three went down to the house.

Of course the food was not ready. Regardless, Michael and I enjoyed the sun outside and talked about a whole bunch of things until the food was ready. It turns out that he really enjoys mission work and wanted to continue it in the future; I sincerely hope that he does! After a good chunk of waiting, the food was ready (I’m always very grateful for food out here)! We had rice, beans, and some very delicious and HOT tea. I think I sat blowing on the tea for almost 10 minutes to get it to a good temperature. During our meal we talked and Paul showed us his failed bets. I truly do not see the appeal of losing money over a soccer game, but to each their own!

We finished up and went back to the office where I proceeded to shave! I don’t have much to shave, just some peach fuzz, but it does look bad after a couple of weeks. It sounds silly to shave at the office, but Michael has a nice mirror up there to use and I wanted to use a real mirror instead of my phone for once (yes, I could’ve brought the mirror down but it’s easier to bring the shaving stuff up so you don’t forget the mirror. It’s also more fun this way). Michael ended up shaving as well and he looked five years younger without any facial hair! I also lined up Michael’s hair lines around his neck and ears as it was starting to bug him (I’m starting to get some real hair cutting experience out here). To add to the hair cutting train, Eli went and shaved his facial hair too! Safe to say that Michael’s electric shaver is getting the work in.

I worked on more Math Club stuff and Mr. Chesco’s laptop. In order to wipe his entire computer I needed to reset the operating system and do all sorts of technical mumbo jumbo I’ll leave out of this. It’ll take a while and is a little complicated to do correctly. A challenge I’m excited to take on!

Henry, Eli, and I got some pretty good work done until it was time to go play some soccer. I was hesitant at first, but figured it’s always a ton of fun (I don’t love getting all nasty sweaty). There was a large file that needed to be downloaded for Mr. Chesco so while I left that running, I went back to my house to change (I forgot to repack my soccer clothes). Michael decided to play too and left with me at the same time! Unfortunately, Henry was still recovering from his small injury (twisted ankle from a hidden hole in the field) and wanted to rest a little more.

I got all changed and ran back up to the office and met up with Michael at the exact same time at the office (perfect timing). I checked on my download and wanted to leave with Michael, but there was a motorcycle on the way that needed Michael’s mechanic expertise. Hearing that there was a vehicle that I love to ride, I waited for a bit until it showed up to give it a look. To my disappointment, it was an electric motorcycle that pulled up, no fun (gas engines are cooler of course)! 

I proceeded to make my way down to the field and played soccer. It was 3 on 4 again and a ton of fun. My team was Peter, Eli, a random village boy, and I against Luka, Simba, and another village man. The opposing team was clearly way better and the score was 4-1 before we knew it. Eli was being extra physical this game and ended up injuring the unknown village man enough to make him leave the game (he felt very bad, but that’s simply the nature of pick up soccer; it’s physical). This meant that I was switched to the winning team to balance out the numbers! During the game, we had a small audience of Chesco, Henry, and some other people from around the area that made the game more fun (we had people to play for after all!). 

The game went long and it got very dark towards the end of it. Michael showed up by fixing the motorcycle (broken horn and headlight) and played for a little bit. His shoes gave him no grip so he was slipping all over the place and providing quite the entertainment for everyone watching. At one point he got the ball right in front of the goal and completely missed (something I’ve done several times)! 

The game was over and we all went back to the office. I walked back with a young kid who watched the whole game and Henry! We worked together to take each of his arms and launch him up the hill which he seemed to enjoy thoroughly. Back at the office, I found that the download I left didn’t work at all (my laptop turned off, small oversight by me). To get the download done some more and relax, I sat in the office with Michael and Miraclin and blogged while they both watched shows. Watching any sort of media out here takes a lot of bandwidth (internet capacity) which meant that the internet was laughably slow for me. At one point my laptop told me that my download would finish in a short time of 245 days! This time I learned that Michael got a 111 on his final! I’m super proud and glad that he was able to succeed taking a difficult class all the way out here in Tanzania (I can’t say I didn’t help being a lucky charm once more)!

I stayed in the office until a little past 9 where Paul texted me to come down for dinner. I wrapped things up, grabbed the router, talked to Hosea for a bit, and went down to the house. Just before I got past the kitchen, Simba and another man (I played soccer with one day) asked me to stop so they could finish downloading their movie! I of course let them finish the download with the router I had in my hand, and finished my journey back to the house when they were finished (took a minute at most). I got back, said hi to Paul, noticed the “tikiti maji” on the table (watermelon), and set down all of my stuff in my room. My room was kind of a disaster so I organized it a bit before going back out.

For dinner we had potatoes and beef tonight which was amazing! The potatoes were filling and the beef had a wonderful hit of ginger with it. The watermelon was also some of the best I’ve ever had even though it was full to the brim with seeds (lots of spitting!). As I ate, Paul relayed some sad news to me! His girlfriend is leaving tomorrow! There goes my good eating for the rest of the week.

After eating and feeling completely stuffed, I danced a ton with his girlfriend to some worship music. Once more the power of music transcended language and we were able to enjoy our time together (the worship music had saxophone along with other horn instruments which is something I wish worship music had more of back home!). As the dancing settled down, I noticed how much Paul sports bet! I hope he wins!

At this point, I was exhausted and told Paul as I was going to bed. Before I left he made sure to tell me the plan for tomorrow. To make a long story short, he’s getting his national identity card (essentially like your social security number in Tanzania) and that he’ll be gone all day tomorrow (lots of travelling to get to the office that holds his card). He told me that I do not need to worry about food as I will be taken care of by one of the other hosts. Paul wanted to make sure that I didn’t freak out when I noticed he was missing tomorrow morning!

With the news, I settled into my room, blogged, and called it a night! We’ll see how life is without Paul; I know I’ll miss him!